Eleanor Gordon Smith
speaker
300 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 24 May
Eleanor Gordon Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They live in the same state.
It's not an easy relationship.
When was the last time that you spoke?
Five months ago.
And what was that like?
Do you ever talk about it?
Is she able to accept that you might just not know?
Do you think you could?
Do you think there's anything that could change your mind?
Nicole is no more certain about what happened today than she was when she was 16.
She never flipped a coin and picked something to believe.
But she landed on a certainty about what to do, but doesn't rest on what to believe.
It doesn't matter what the evidence says.
She wants her mum.
The things that stood out to me in the research were things like who we believe, things like how we see ourselves, our own picture of our own identity, the things that we hope for, things that we wish were true. These kinds of things went into the ways that people change their minds in really quite surprising ways.
Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure.
I mean, you've put your finger on a large part of the problem just there, which is that we have this kind of self-congratulatory notion that we are reasonable, that the people who we disagree with are the ones who aren't being reasonable, and therefore we're the ones who must be being reasonable.
But part of my motivation in calling on us to let go of that thought is that I think it turns out to be really much more complicated than we might have imagined to work out what it in fact is to be reasonable. So we have a lot of
pretty simple slogan type ideas about what it might be to be reasonable, things that boil off to pretty simple injunctions like you should doubt more or you shouldn't believe what you've been told or you should be thinking with your brain and not with your emotions.
And these ideas, I think, if you push on them even a little bit, they turn out to be much more complicated than we might have imagined. And those turn out to not be necessarily the best rules for what it in fact is to think well or to change your mind well.
Showing 221–240 of 300 · page 12 of 15
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